I think I read awhile back (while in the throes of grief that the closest Crumbs shop to me was closing down) that cupcakes have been on a little bit of a roller coaster in the last few years, embarking on a wild ascent from supermarket-only to trendy to out-of-your-mind popular before being ousted from their throne by donuts. Something like that? In this little world of mine, they’ve been on a steady trajectory of adoration only — for me, they have that nostalgic timelessness of Funfetti box mix and frosting out of a can, and even at their most gourmet they’re stout and cheerful and low-maintenance, ready to be lined up on vinyl tablecloths at birthday parties and eaten with utensil-less abandon (or, in my case, eyed carefully to see which one is a little bit fatter than the others, and then eaten with abandon). I’m pretty sure I will always love them. Which makes it all the more astonishing to me that there are hardly any recipes for cupcakes to be found in this space, and none at all since around 2013! With work kicking my butt lately, and in the mood for an easy but buoyantly happy recipe to disrupt that monotony, I thought this was a perfect time to change that.

Happy first week of spring! With how mild our winter has been this year, it doesn’t feel real that it should be spring already, but here we are. (And it’s supposed to be sunshine-y and 70 degrees today!) Still, for the lingering blustery days we’ve been having here and there, I thought one more batch of soft, squishy sweet rolls, maybe for an Easter brunch or two, was in order before all the fresh, springy produce and summer baking to come. Because, you know, it’s not difficult for me to feel that squishy sweet rolls are in order. (Just see these and these!)

If you couldn’t tell from this blog, B2 and I are about the unfanciest people in the world. Most of the time, being a lawyer is just as unfancy (and for me generally consists of (a) sitting at a desk, (b) clicking things on a screen, and (c) wondering what on earth I’m doing). But every once in a blue moon, our firms decide to celebrate something or other in which we have a very small part, and invite us to a fancy place we’d probably never otherwise go. So this is how I got to tag along with B2 to a nice dinner last year when one of his firm’s cases settled, where we sat at the kiddie end of the table and talked to the other junior associates about the most pressing legal issues of the day (i.e. the best time of day to find free snacks in the break room) while eating pretty and delicious food.

We’re in Hawaii! I had a filing the night before that kept me in the office about a million hours later than I expected, we packed half the things we meant to pack and none of our laundry, but we made it on the plane (I think I set a new record for the most hours I’ve or anyone has ever slept on a single flight) and now I’m sitting at B2’s family’s kitchen counter, blissfully free of legal research and two days away from spending my first Christmas in Honolulu. I visited in January once before, but I’ve never been here for Christmas itself, so I thoroughly enjoyed this surfer Santa and his muumuu-clad Mrs. Claus, I’ve asked B2 about five times too many whether people actually say “mele kalikimaka,” and I’m gleefully sure I just overheard the words “ahi poke for Christmas.” But sunshine aside, it’s still pretty much just like Christmas with my family where it counts — with endless amounts of food, aunties and uncles galore, and B2 and his sister making fun of each other all day, and that coziness is what makes me the happiest about being here. (Also the ahi poke.)

Oh man, it’s been not-enough-hours-in-the-day days around here lately. Most of the time it is safe to ignore me when I say that because I spend about half my waking hours huffing to B2 about the “million things I have to do” and then the other half of those hours on the couch doing zero of those things until it is too late to do them, but for once, it actually has been a little nonstop from one thing to the next. One of them is a very good one, though, and it’s that one of my good friends, source of indispensable life advice, and surrogate jie jie has been in town with her new (!) and awesome fiancé! They’ve been staying with us and I couldn’t be happier about it. I’m convinced that having house guests is one of my favorite ways to see friends. I get to feel like a real grown-up person when I put out “guest linens” and coffee accoutrements “in case you want to make some in the morning” (even if I have a couch instead of a guest bedroom and I forget to put out that cone that goes in the Hario so actually you cannot make some in the morning, oops), and it fits right in with my lazy-homebody agenda (see, e.g.,dinner parties) because when things get hectic for them or me, there’s still always time before bed to sit and chat in pajamas and eat cookies even though you already brushed your teeth.

Hi friends! How was your Thanksgiving? We spent ours with my parents and my brother last week, in a couple of slow, wonderful days at home. It was pretty exciting — we sat around and told the same stories for the eighty-seventh time each, I woke up way earlier than you’d ever usually find me so that I could have sleepy coffees with my dad, my sole responsibilities at any given point were not overfilling the wonton wrappers (I failed) and making sure my mom got a Black Friday discount on a jewelry box from J.C. Penney, and my little brother drove me around everywhere because I’m very lazy and he’s nice and he “misses driving anyway.” So actually it was zero percent exciting. (But one hundred percent awesome.)

We’re scheduled to fly back to Hawaii in a little less than a month, and an email has already landed in our inboxes from my adorable mother-in-law, asking whether we want galbi or spicy ahi poke when we land. (It actually came through like, two weeks ago.) B2’s mom is my favorite for all kinds of reasons, but I love this about her — every time we go home it’s a parade of food she thinks we might want to eat. Plates of fruit appear when we’re not looking, trays of kimbap emerge from a trip to the Korean supermarket, little rows of pastel dduk are lined up meticulously in case we want to nibble on something. On top of that, since I’m neither Korean nor from Hawaii, B2’s mom has made it her personal mission to introduce foods to me that I might not have had before, bringing home everything from fish jeon to Leonard’s malasadas in the name of my food education. (She also has the cutest tiny cocktail forks that she puts out with everything. So pretty much she embodies all my mom goals.)

So I think I’m about five years late to this party. But I am newly, and really, obsessed with dates. They are so good. How are they so good? I don’t know how I was so woefully misinformed, but up until a couple months ago I had this idea that dates were just a vague something to be nibbled on at your grandmother’s house if all the cookies were gone, or maybe used as a convenient vehicle for goat cheese and bacon, or admired from afar as a healthful “substitute-for” things I am generally reluctant to substitute. And then I was gifted a box of really great ones, with fancy things like orange peel and almonds tucked inside, and my world was totally rocked. This is probably news only to me at this point, but it turns out dates are pretty much candy. They have a consistency like caramel and nearly the same buttery taste; they’re sticky and soft and reminiscent of wonderful things like honey, cinnamon and molasses. B2 was unmoved by my date revolution (although he hasn’t gotten tired of responding to “Want a date?” with “I thought we were already married. Get it?”) but, with or without him, I’m fairly sure I’ve eaten my weight in them since April.

I can’t decide what I’m more excited about sharing this morning. This honeycomb candy, feathery-crisp with a subtle heat, dunked gleefully into dark chocolate, and perfectly Halloween-color-schemed, or the book that it came from, The New Sugar & Spice. Both are playful, just the right amount of unconventional, and totally awesome, pretty much just like the lady behind them, and I couldn’t be more thrilled that they are both in my kitchen right now (except there’s not much left of the honeycomb, actually).

This weekend I killed a mosquito! All on my own! (It should say a lot about my capability as a human that this is news.) I feel like combating wily mosquitoes in old, not-quite-insulated apartments is a defining part of the New York summer for us every year. Before B2, I always figured dousing yourself with life-shortening amounts of DEET was the only way to win, or else end up miserably (and ineffectually) smacking yourself in the ear all night, huddling under the sheet, and waking up with a constellation of bites on the inch of forehead and the two toes you left exposed.